Bond girl Jane and a cruel family tragedy as raw as a Polish winter: CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night's TV

Jane Seymour has played opera diva Maria Callas, French queen Marie Antoinette and been a Bond girl - but her own story trumped them all, in Who Do You Think You Are?

Who Do You Think You Are?

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The TV That Made Me

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Jane Seymour has played opera diva Maria Callas and French queen Marie Antoinette. She has been a Bond girl — Solitaire, opposite Roger Moore in Live And Let Die — and the woman who forced Edward VIII to abdicate, American adventuress Wallis Simpson.

But her own story trumped them all, in Who Do You Think You Are? (BBC1). If family history could win Oscars, her tale of heroism and cruel tragedy during the Holocaust would take every prize.

Now in its 12th series, Who Do You Think You Are? usually delves into celebrity ancestry, digging back half a dozen generations. This episode was dramatically different: it focused solely on two of Jane’s close family, her father’s aunts, Michaela and Jadwiga, who were Polish Jews.

That was the first twist in the story: Miss Seymour was born Joyce Frankenberg, and borrowed her stage name from one of Henry VIII’s queens to create the image of an English rose.

Straight away this felt like a departure from the established formula, and not just because Jane, instead of marching off to the archives office as the show’s guests generally do, flew from her Malibu mansion in California straight to Warsaw, a city of grey apartment blocks and tram-cars.

Her search felt urgent, almost as if she could find her great-aunts and cousins alive if she looked hard enough. That was a grim illusion, because her own father, John, had gone to Belsen concentration camp immediately after World War II on the same desperate, fruitless mission.

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But the records showed Michaela and Jadwiga had somehow survived the war. Both women were married to doctors, highly respected men who had used all their influence in an attempt to save their families.

If family history could win Oscars, her tale of heroism and cruel tragedy during the Holocaust would take every prize. Pictured are Jane Seymour 's ancestors: (L-R) Great uncle Herman Temerson, Jerzy Temerson, Hanna Temerson and great aunt Jadwiga Temerson

Jane Seymour flew from her Malibu mansion in California straight to Warsaw to trace the history of her relatives such as Hanna Temerson (left) - just as her own father John Frankenberg (right) had gone to Belsen concentration camp immediately after World War II to search for family survivors

Jadwiga’s husband was murdered by a German soldier, shot dead at a window during the Nazi retreat from Poland towards the end of the war. But he had managed to smuggle his wife and children out of the Warsaw ghetto where tens of thousands were starving to death.

The rare photographs that have survived from that time are so horrific — skeletal bodies lying in the streets, hollow-eyed children seized by death squads — that they seem remote, almost medieval, even though they were taken less than 75 years ago.

GENTLEMAN OF THE WEEK

Former Radio 1 DJ Tony Blackburn was trying his hand at being a shepherd in Flockstars (ITV).

Trouble was, he couldn’t bear to shout at his sheepdog, Bess.

‘Excuse me, if you don’t mind, come-bye if it’s all right with you,’ he pleaded. Bess ignored him.

It was Jane’s presence that helped us remember how recent this horror was. She was dressed for Warsaw in filmstar style, with a hat like a furry bicycle wheel. But she had no irritating Hollywood mannerisms, and when she wept for Jadwiga’s slaughtered children, her tears were not effects for the camera.

Michaela’s story followed a different thread — flight from Paris where her husband was working to help Jewish refugees, betrayal by the French Vichy government and eventual escape to Switzerland.

The sisters were reunited in 1946, but this proved the bitterest twist of all. Racked with grief for her children and petrified of being sent back to Soviet-occupied Poland, Jadwiga took her own life. This episode had none of the flavour of an academic detective story that usually makes the show pleasantly engrossing. It was as raw and painful as a Polish winter.

Personal history as light entertainment is the theme of The TV That Made Me (BBC1), a mixture of chat and telly clips showing every afternoon. Brian Conley’s latest guest was Ann Widdecombe, remembering her schooldays as a convent girl and its highlight — crowding round the black-and-white set in the third-form common room to watch Richard Chamberlain as Doctor Kildare.

There was a strongly religious thread to her best-loved shows, from Patrick Troughton as St Paul in 1960’s Paul Of Tarsus, to Derek Jacobi as the monastic sleuth Brother Cadfael in the Nineties.

But Ann’s got a rebellious streak, too, and she wanted to see footage from the Fifties rock ’n’ roll show Six-Five Special, and the racy Eighties soap Howard’s Way.

The trouble is that, because of copyright fees, the clips are just a few seconds long, leaving us longing to see more. Paul Of Tarsus deserves a full re-run. So does Howards’ Way, come to that.

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Jane Seymour's story on Who Do You Think You Are? CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews